Last Night's TV: It is utterly frightening to think that I have lived all my adult life with The Bill on my TV screen. I remember the first series, back in 1984, after a successful 1983 pilot.
Thirties in colour - A World Away
BBC Four, 9pm
Does the title refer to the distance of the places in 1930s amateur film-maker Rosie Newman's footage from her London home? Or to the life she led, in comparison to the one going on around her in the decade that ended in the outbreak of the Second World War?
True stories: Stanley Kubrick's Boxes
More4, 10pm
River City
BBC1, 8pm
The insight True Stories offered into Stanley Kubrick's mind by way of
boxes, more boxes and then some more boxes of, well, stuff, was utterly compelling. I thought I was a hoarder, and believe me, there are a fair amount of boxes in my attic. But this? This was incredible. Kubrick's films rank among my favourites, in particular The Shining and Full Metal Jacket, but I knew little about the elaborate and at times completely bonkers process of his pre-production.
Crime and punishment were the order of the day on Five last night, though in a frankly slapdash bit of scheduling the schedulers placed them the wrong way around. I mean, really. Shoddy work. Somebody should be banged up.
Marco's Great British Feast, ITV1, 9pm
A rum dish, Marco's Great British Feast, judged by the first of its four weekly courses. Sporadically piquant, but I'm not sure I can swallow all of it. This is on account of its host, of course, one-time Francophile enfant terrible of the kitchen Marco Pierre White.
Coronation Street ITV1, 7.30pm and 8.30pm
Criminal Justice, BBC1, 9pm
As the late Fred Elliott, Coronation Street's own Foghorn Leghorn, might have put it: "Ah seh we allus knew daft Liz shouldn't 'ave wed gormless Vernon Tomlin, ah seh we allus knew."
Casualty, BBC1, 8.50pm (Saturday)
The Royal, Channel, 8pm
You always get a more multi-layered and emotionally complex type of accident in Casualty, don't you? Take Saturday's example. It erupted around Jo, who'd been out shopping in a Holby retail mall but had grown distressed by the unwelcome attentions of a chap whom she perceived to be a loitering lurker. She took refuge in the mall's disability lavvy, only to find herself discomfited by the noisy arrival of a disabled woman, Maxine, who was engaged in a bitter domestic squabble with her daughter.
One bizarre bisexual love triangle.
Two illegitimate children, one fathered in 1959, the other in 1998. Two marriages. Countless instances of
sexual shenanigans.
Legend of the crystal skulls: Revealed
Five, 8pm
Supersizers go... regency
BBC2, 9pm
IF, like me, you've recently been to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you'll have come away with mixed feelings.
Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick were a couple whose forbidden marital passion derived its greatest erotic thrill from being conducted in total secrecy. Their marriage lasted for 36 years, from 1873 until Hannah’s death in 1909.
How TV Changed Britain
Channel 4, 8pm
Tony Robinson's Crime and Punishment
Channel 4, 7pm
A mild comic exercise in cod-sociology, How TV Changed Britain trawled through 46 years of residential property programmes. Stephen Mangan's entertainingly sarky voice-over alleged that Barry Bucknell, an uncertain-seeming presenter who scorned the scandalous informality of overalls, was the fellow who did most to wreak lasting physical damage on a nation's homes.
House: Five, 9pm
Heroes: BBC2, 9pm
IT was a mighty risky plotline: would House pull it off? To recap: House is a glossy-looking and unspeakably preposterous TV melodrama set in an unbelievably all-action New Jersey hospital, Princeton-Plainsboro.
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